


a stone floating upstream

by Plooby



Series: and as we fall we sing [3]
Category: Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: F/F, imagination adventures about dragon age ocs, semi-unrequited crushes on severely traumatized bisexual disaster butches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-16
Updated: 2020-06-16
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:08:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24758308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Plooby/pseuds/Plooby
Summary: Yvangelline Cousland needs to tell Alistair she's sorry for a lot of things. (Her dog is just there for moral support.)
Relationships: Female Cousland/Leliana (Dragon Age)
Series: and as we fall we sing [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1790470
Comments: 1
Kudos: 6





	a stone floating upstream

As far as he could tell Eamon's whole estate was abed, but of course Alistair couldn't even begin to think of sleep. He had given up and come out to the front courtyard, and just sat himself down in a patch of grass along the outer wall like he would if they were at camp, his back to the stone and his arms slung over his knees with eyes on the stars. The bustle of voices and wagon-wheels and footsteps from out in the market square spoiled any illusion there might have been of being anywhere but in a city, though, not to mention that special faint whiff of sewage that seemed to linger faintly everywhere you went. The urge to tear off into the night, screaming his fool head off, and keep running until wherever his legs gave up was very strong for a little while, but what would be the point of that? They'd find him eventually. And in the end, more importantly, he'd said he would do it. 

No point thinking about it now. Still, even though it was cold, the idea of going inside was just too many walls to bear. 

The door to the kitchen creaked open after some time, which surprised him; even after hours, he couldn't imagine the servant who would dare the cook's wrath with sneaking out. When he looked, though, the person that it actually was surprised him even more. 

Yvangelline only stood behind the open door for a moment, looking around outside as best she could in the dim torchlight. She was dressed down from the day, all armor and Warden colors set aside for just a plain tunic and breeches, a scarf set around the high neck as her only concession to the cold. It was only when her gaze lit on him that her expression shifted, and she stepped fully outside -- and of course Guinefort followed at her heels, before she shut the door quietly behind her. He trotted over to Alistair as soon as he'd spotted him, leaving Yvangelline behind, wagging his little stub of a tail and panting through a doggy grin, and Alistair hid his sigh and climbed to his feet along the wall. No doubt they'd come to collect him, and she would tell him with sweet perfect manners and in no uncertain terms to stop sulking like a little boy, and come inside and go to bed. 

But when Yvangelline came over to him, that didn't happen, and the better the look he got at her face, the less it seemed likely to. She was almost his exact same height, and she didn't have to look up at him for him to see the misery written plainly across her big dark eyes. It caught him off-guard enough that for once, he couldn't think of anything to say at all. 

"Are you all right?" she asked quietly, at last, bringing a sad end to a truly legendary awkward silence. Alistair was thrown by it all over again, and then he exhaled a sheepish breath, dropping her hard-to-meet gaze. 

"Yes, I'm fine. Just getting some air. Why -- were you looking for me, is something wrong?" 

"No, not exactly." He risked another glance up, but it was horrible: she was still just looking at him like that. "I only thought..." 

She seemed to lose her thread there, though, and sighed, looking off at nothing to one side instead. The night breeze was tousling at the brutally short tail of black hair at the back of her head, flicking prankish strands loose across the shaved underside. Guinefort sat at her feet, looking between the two of them attentively as though he were curious to hear what they'd say. Honestly, knowing that dog, he probably was. 

"I owe you an apology," she said at last, more firmly, and looked back at him, somehow with more of that awful sorrow than ever. "I'm so sorry, Alistair. I truly am. You were right, I knew how you felt about the idea of being king. What I did was unfair to you, and selfish." 

To say that it wasn't what he'd been expecting didn't really cover it. When he recovered himself enough, he managed to laugh a little, if only for something to do with himself. "How was it... selfish, exactly? Is this where you tell me you've been secretly plotting a coup all this time? Because if so, I actually really admire how well you play the long game." 

"I'm afraid I'll have to disappoint you, then," Yvangelline said, not without the slightest edge of a smile at one corner of her mouth. He tried to summon up one of his own, to run with the joke to somewhere that felt less unstable, but before he could she had let out another breath that her shoulders dropped with, and gone on. "I couldn't... stop thinking of what happened in Orzammar. What Bhelen did when he assumed the throne, and after all we'd done to help him. Was it right, that we aided him? Was anything we did right? Should we have been involved at all, was it our place to -- What will happen there now, to everyone who lives in the city? What have we left behind us, all this time, in the wake of trying to do right?" 

Even more alarmingly on top of everything else, her voice was beginning to waver and crack, and she curled her arms around her own middle as if to hold something in. "It was the same with Loghain, you having to do it instead -- I knew what it meant to you, I just didn't want anyone else to _die_. I didn't want to make another decision that would leave someone without their home and their family, I just..." She gulped a sobbing breath -- and bloody hell, she was _crying_ now, the starlight and torchlight picking out bright lines of tears down the dark of her cheeks, this was just his exact luck, he had to be king because the noblest and most beautiful woman he'd ever met had made him do it, _and_ now she was standing here crying about it. Guinefort whined softly, but she didn't seem to notice. "If there's even one person in all the world who I knew I could trust _not_ to make me feel like I'd ruined everything -- I knew it would be you. I knew I could trust you with it, if you were made king. And I just... couldn't..." 

She couldn't seem to go on with the rest, though: only stood there in front of him folded in on herself, her head tucked down, looking more terribly small than he'd ever imagined she could. It was all absolutely beyond the limit of what he could bear. Without thinking about it -- because he might have thought better of it -- Alistair stepped forward and put his arms around her. It took a moment, but eventually she let go her arms around herself, and put them around him instead. Her face pressed into his shoulder, her back shaking under his hands. 

"You didn't make any of the messes we've found," he said softly, over her shoulder, out into the night. "I don't think you even could have fixed them, not completely. And it's all right. There's just the one of you." 

"It doesn't feel all right," Yvangelline said, in a small dry gasping voice, into his shirt. Alistair sighed, and patted her back. 

"I know." He let her linger there a moment, until her breath started to sound almost under control again, and then drew back to arms' length, still holding her shoulders. "Listen. Do you... want to go see if Oghren's passed out yet, and we can steal that mung of his and get very drunk?" 

That startled Yvangelline into a second of wide-eyed staring and then a big snort of laughter, with her hand over her face right afterward. Guinefort barked with what he would swear was disapproval, but Alistair couldn't help being encouraged. 

"Or -- " He held up a hand. "Better idea -- I think Eamon might still keep a cellar here. We could see if we can find something to become very drunk with that _won't_ make us go blind." 

"I would be positively delighted to," Yvangelline said as she dropped her hand away. And though her face was still wet and her lips were a bit trembly, there was a broad and real smile on them, all the same. 

Sometimes, you had to take what you could get. 

\--- 

"Did you know I'm not really a Cousland?" Yvangelline said after a moment's pause, when they had both been sitting for some hour or so in Alistair's spot by the wall, talking of nothing of consequence, shoulder-to-shoulder and pleasantly blurry from the bottle they were passing. Guinefort lay in a massive sprawl beside Yvangelline's other hip, blissful from her idle stroking of his ears and occasionally cracking open an eye to peer at them. Alistair glanced at her, frowning, and she looked back and then smiled, dropping her eyes. "No, of course you wouldn't. You're not from Highever." 

"What do you mean?" Alistair asked, when she'd been quiet for a moment. "Case of mistaken identity?" She smiled and shook her head, but didn't respond right away, only seeming to think about it at first. She took another sip of whiskey before passing the bottle back, and starting to speak. 

"My mother and father always wanted a large family. They loved children. But when my brother Fergus was born..." She wrapped an arm around her knees, rocking back as she looked up at the sky. "It was a very difficult birth. They both survived, barely, by the Maker's grace -- well, and my mother's. She was a warrior too, a more courageous one than my father by his telling of it, and she fought until she'd won. She recovered, but the healers told her the ordeal had broken her womb. She'd never bear more children." Alistair nodded, hoping it showed his sympathy, and she went on. "It broke her heart. And Father's too, but that only made it more difficult for her -- she blamed herself, for not being able to live up to what they'd both wanted. They loved Fergus, of course, but.. 

"Well, at any rate, they tried to become accustomed to what had happened, and make the most of matters. But a few years later, my father was traveling in the south of Ferelden, leading a peacekeeping force in aid of the Bannorn. On the road, he and his guard came upon the remains of a caravan that appeared to have been attacked and pillaged by raiders. There were fires, bodies all around. From their symbols and clothing and the make of their things, Father said he thought they were Chasind." She paused, and when Alistair offered her the bottle back, she accepted it but took only a small sip more. "Everyone had been slain -- except as Father and his men came near, they heard the sound of a baby crying, from inside one of the wagons. Apparently the child had been asleep when the raiders struck, in a basket with a blanket stretched over it, and they must have been looting so quickly they took it for rags or something else of little value. Whatever the reason, there was a baby girl left alive, the only one of all the caravan. That was me. 

"Father took me from the wagon and took me with them, as I think any compassionate soul would have done. He and his men had to divert to Redcliffe to find a wet-nurse, I was still so small -- he laughed about that when he told the story, all those seasoned guardsmen in their armor panicking when I turned my head from sheep's-milk." There was half a smile on her lips now, telling it, although it looked wan. "They brought me home, when they returned. It seemed like divine providence to Father, given what had happened. A gift from the Maker. Mother and Fergus were delighted, and straight away Father announced to the castle that the Maker had seen fit to bless him and Mother with a second child, a daughter. Everyone knew Mother hadn't given birth again, but what of that? He was the teyrn. If he said I was their child, then their child I was. And as far as anyone outside of Highever ever knew of it, that was the way of things." 

"That was very generous of him," Alistair said -- not really sure what else to say. In one way, it seemed odd that she wouldn't have brought this up when he'd told her how Eamon had raised him, and in another, it made a great deal of sense that she wouldn't. Yvangelline looked a bit surprised by his saying it, for a second, and then smiled as she passed the bottle back to him. 

"In a way, I suppose. In a way it was very lucky for my family and me both. It's still difficult not to see the Maker's hand in it, even if I wished not to." She paused, looking over at Guinefort as she rubbed his massive head. "...In another way, though, it seems a bit unfair. Why should I have come from nowhere and become one of Highever's heirs? Were there not children born in the castle who could have been raised up the same way? But no one ever seemed to resent me for it, as far as I knew; and maybe they would have done if it _had_ been one of their own. When it could have been any one of them but wasn't, instead of being a gift the Maker doled out personally into my father's hand." Her smile at that looked more thin and forced than ever, and Alistair occupied himself with the whiskey instead of looking at it any longer. 

"It was never a secret, in any case. My family made no attempt to hide it from me, and just as well, since surely they couldn't have once I was of any age of reason: they were all three fair of skin and light of eye, for one thing, and Fergus looked very like Father and Mother both." The smile she offered Alistair this time was at least only rueful. "They spoke of where I had come from freely from the time I was very small, and my father told me the story when I was old enough to ask. It was simply never treated as something that mattered at all to who I was to them. I was my parents' daughter, and they loved me. They saw that I was safe, and wanted for nothing. To the end, and beyond." 

She was silent for a moment: staring out into the darkness ahead of them, and absolutely seeing none of it, and nothing in it. "I know it must have seemed cowardly, not to speak when the Guardian of the Sacred Ashes asked his question," she said., finally Her voice was much too even now, by contrast to earlier: too steady. There was no evidence of the drink in her now. "But I only did not answer because I felt the answer was obvious. Of course I failed my mother, my parents. Of course I should have died beside them. After all that they gave to me, everything they were... I can never forgive that I let Duncan take me from their side, and lived. Nothing else can make up for that, as long as I continue to live." 

Silence thundered in this time behind those words: a huge, shocked thing of it, like a boulder in their midst. Alistair could only stare into the dark himself for a moment, frozen, before he was able to even begin to think what to say. 

"I don't think that's fair," he tried, when he felt like he could speak. It sounded weak even to himself. "That's... not what _they_ would have wanted, at least, from what you've said." 

Yvangelline's mouth turned very slightly, though there was no real smile in her eyes. "No," she agreed, still calm. "But it's what should have happened." 

Alistair couldn't look at her. His eyes dropped to his hands, draped over his knees, and he tried to keep his swallow quiet. The wind was getting bitterer by the minute, where it ruffled through his hair, tousled the ends of hers. 

"It's not what I would have wanted, either, if that matters," he said, quietly, after another moment. "I'd be really sorry never to have known you." He hesitated, and then snorted a faint attempt at a laugh. "Can you imagine the mess I'd have made of things on my own? Just one pratfall after another across Ferelden. I guess I could've sold tickets, that'd be something." 

"I think you sell yourself short," Yvangelline said, though, not matching his humor. She still wasn't looking at him, though. "You always do." 

He had no joke for that. After another pause, Yvangelline sighed, and leaned back on the wall behind her, turning her face back toward Alistair. There was at least a bit more expression in it now, although it wasn't really better: it was sorry and worried again, mouth soft and brows tight. 

"There's another apology I owe you," she said, and that was softer now too. He frowned at her, and she dropped her gaze before going on. "I... let you think that you had misinterpreted certain things, when you hadn't. When I told you that we were only friends -- " Alistair started to say something there, to interrupt, as much out of sheer desperation as anything else, but she raised her eyes and her expression firmed as she cut him off. "I misled you. You weren't wrong to think there had been more to it than that. I made it seem like you were, to try to make things simpler, but I shouldn't have. That really was cowardly, and I should apologize for that too." 

He couldn't unstick his tongue at all now, and Yvangelline went on if only to fill the silence, again not meeting his eyes. "There... was something. I won't claim there wasn't, now. I did feel it too. I only..." She trailed off, and sighed again. "...I was afraid. Of so many things. I told Leliana, I never told you: a woman died, the night the castle was attacked, because she was with me. The elven maid of a friend of my mother's. Because I was blithe and foolish and selfish, and I never thought of -- how it must have been for her, how she surely couldn't have felt she could say _no_ , to the noble daughter of her mistress's companion, and then -- " Her voice was shaking again, her lower lip too, but she made a visible attempt to gather herself. "I know she surely would have been killed anyway, everyone was slain, but she _was_ killed because she was with me. When they came for me, they cut her down, and... I didn't want anyone else to be hurt because of me. Not ever again. Whatever I wanted, I was too afraid." She took a breath, seeming to try to hold it in her chest, to measure it on its way out. At the end of it, she could seem to manage a flicker of a smile. "But Leliana was... not content with that. She wouldn't let me slip away without an answer, when... you had. And as grateful as I had truly been, that you hadn't, that didn't seem fair, but..." She rubbed her face, and then looked up at him, a look he couldn't possibly meet. "I'm sorry. I was dishonest with you, about all of it, and I regret that very much. But you deserve to know. It wasn't only you." 

Alistair's throat was dry when she fell quiet, and there was, he found, a knot of something like resentment closed up in his chest: _you're telling me all this_ now _?_ But there didn't seem to be anything to do with it -- not in the face of all that. He swallowed it instead, although somehow a bitter little laugh got out anyway. "So... it was my own fault for being a coward, you mean." 

"That's not what I mean," she said quietly, her eyes large and solemn on the side of his face. He sighed, and shut his eyes. 

"No, but it's true." She started to speak again, and he opened his eyes again and smiled at her sidelong before she could, rather wanly now himself. "It's all right. Water under the bridge, and all that. I'm... just glad you make each other happy." 

Yvangelline smiled, and it looked like it might have been a bit more real -- though still more shadowed than he thought he could entirely understand, at that moment. "I think we do," she said. "I also think, though, it's still you I rely on the most. You're the best friend I've ever had, Alistair." She paused, her hand just resting now on Guinefort's haunches, and then shut her eyes on a weary breath. "I never meant to hurt you. Never at all." 

"I know." He touched her upper back, lightly, and she went with it to lean on his shoulder, under his arm. Her weight was slight for someone so strong, and her hair smelled faintly like some sort of flower he'd probably never know the name of. He tried not to pay attention to any of that, to just keep his eyes on the stars. "It's all right." 

He did know. Of course he knew. That was her all over: always wanting to help, to do the best thing for everyone else but herself. But she didn't always get what she wanted, to say the least; and what he was much less sure of was whether it was actually all right or not. 

And it was only much later that he finally knew it wasn't, and finally understood how much. When he tried to explain to Leliana, to tell her some measure of all this, what he thought he'd come to realize: that Yvangelline had hesitated with both of them not because she feared she might hurt someone, but because she'd known for certain that she would. It all came out wrong anyway, when he did. _I think part of her was just broken,_ he'd try to say, when they were still stunned and numb and exhausted from a day of helping where they could in a Denerim that still reeked of smoke and blood, _or got left back in that castle and never made it out, I think she was looking for a place to die from before I ever met her and she just finally found one,_ but by then Leliana's eyes had been hardening and she had been angry, furious with him, and why wouldn't she be? Who wanted to lose the woman they loved and then hear that she'd never meant to stay with them, that they hadn't been enough to make her want to live when weighed against everything else? Stupid. He never should have said anything. He should have known better. 

He should have known better about a lot of things. 

Eamon and some of the others stood by him in his coronation, as he was crowned king of Ferelden and set to rule it alone. But it didn't feel like enough, now. A part of him couldn't help wondering if it ever would again. 

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the song "Ghost Fields" by Murder By Death.
> 
> (All titles in the series are from song lyrics; the title of the full series if from "Beautiful Gas Mask" by the Mountain Goats.)


End file.
